US-style policing in the UK? No thanks

Former Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton, who will be advising the government on policing. Photograph: Branimir Kvartuc/AP

I have some sympathy for anyone who happens to be prime minister when urban riots break out. But they're all volunteers, and David Cameron seems to be getting into a muddle over his handling of the police and the coalition's supposed "zero tolerance" policy response to lawlessness.

We'd better get this right or we risk lurching into an American view of policing – as a smart article predicts – which has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world: more than 2 million people in prison, twice that number on probation or parole, at any one time. No thanks.

Listening to Cameron speak in his Witney constituency yesterday, I also noticed a significant omission. His list of problematic attitudes and behaviour in wider society, conduct that may help to explain last week's disorder, did not include the relentless pressure of commercial advertising – "buy our stuff!" – which hits the poor hardest.

He sometimes does (remember the policy aimed at combating the "sexualisation of children"?), but not yesterday. It did not fit the needs of a punitive response. We know voters want looters punished – I do myself – but appropriate punishment is only half the equation. Cameron sounded too much like Michael Howard, his old boss, did on the radio this morning.

But what about policing? Margaret Thatcher was always careful to keep them on side, one reason why their self-interested trade union habits were not assailed by her Chobham armour-plated handbag. Not even Howard made much progress against "canteen culture" in his Home Office days.

All that, and ministers got themselves into an unseemly row with senior officers over their own role in getting riot policy on an uneven keen after the initial operational stumble in Tottenham.

Sir Hugh Orde, a prime candidate for the Met job (he ran the police in Northern Ireland, quite a challenge) dares tick them off and tell them not to be so "thin-skinned".

Incidentally, I don't think anything like enough attention has been given to the Met's explanation for their inept start, given to MPs by Cameron on Wednesday.

It was that the police initially saw the riots as a public order issue, a form of political protest like last winter's student riots or the G20 protests. In consequence, they handled them warily, aware that they might be criticised for heavy-handedness, as they were – by the Guardian among others – on those occasions.

Only on Monday, too late, did they see that they were mostly dealing with opportunistic and apolitical looting.

Yet of all the acres of guff and wisdom I read about the riots this weekend, the article which stuck most firmly – and alarmingly – in the mind was by a clever American. What he said in effect was: "Say goodbye to your unarmed British bobby, you lot have opted for our version of liberty now and it will have to be policed much more robustly from here on."

Christopher Caldwell is a conservative who writes for the Weekly Standard, a highbrow Washington magazine. His FT analysis (subscription) was rather smarter than Fleet Street's home-grown end-of-civilisation hysterics (think David Starkey?) or foreigners like Rush Limbaugh, the mouthy US radio shock-jock.

Limbaugh called last week's Tottenham-led mayhem "the flower of socialism in full bloom", when any idiot with even half a brain should be able see it was as American as pecan pie in so many ways.

I'll come back to Caldwell. All this has a bearing on Cameron's decision to recruit William J "Bill" Bratton, the can-do cop with the "no tolerance/broken windows" theories, who ran the police departments in New York, LA and Boston, as an adviser, and possibly as head of the Metropolitan police force. Bratton seems quite taken with the idea.

I'm sure he did well in his time, but he's become a super-cop celeb and he'd spend most of his time at the Met unlearning his preconceptions about Britain's law and order culture and his inappropriate lessons from home. Fabio Capello, anyone? Sven-Göran Eriksson?

Cameron remains adamant that he's not going to back down on police budgets because they can make better use of the Labour-enhanced manpower they've already got. Too much bureaucracy, too much paperwork, he said.

That's probably a fair point, though it's interesting to see ministers torn between their "localism" rhetoric and the need to push policy reform forward from the centre, Tony Blair style.

I'm sure he's right, but how does that fit with elected local police chiefs responding to community demands?

The coppers are already pushing back on community policing, promoted by ex-mayor Ken Livingstone, and ex-Met chief Sir Ian (no relation) Blair, who was putsched by Boris Johnson with Home Office connivance.

They blame its high demands on police time – visible bobbies on the beat – for undermining their anti-riot procedures, all of which sounds a bit convenient to me.

Remember, it was a squad from Scotland Yard – not Tottenham police – who shot Michael Duggan dead in circumstances that are getting no clearer. The Daily Mail has done its efficient best to paint him as a bad man – he certainly had some very unpleasant relatives, two arrested for looting in Manchester – but it can't quite make the gangster story stick.

Back to Caldwell. Actually his article wasn't the FT's only gloomy bit of punditry at the weekend. Gautam Malkani wrote a piece which invoked the prophetic quality of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, turned into a memorable film by Stanley Kubrick: demonic, recreational violence caused by boredom.

"In 2011 there is an additional consumer component and a self-destructive one. Self-destruction is more dystopian even that nihilism. Not only does it imply hopelessness, it suggests this week's rioters are cut off not just from society, but also from themselves," wrote Malkani, the author of the novel Londonistan.

That's bleak. Which makes Caldwell's conservative worldly wisdom even bleaker. British culture has always been individualistic, but has become radically anti-authoritarian and diverse over the last 50 years. The old consensus, which permitted gentle, unarmed policing, is one of the casualties of this change, he argues. Reformers have thrown out the baby of authority with the bathwater of privilege.

"And this is the tragedy. Britain has chosen a different kind of liberty, one that does not rest on shared values. That is, it has chosen a US-style liberty, and this will have to be safeguarded in an American way," he writes.

Americans fear their police – and with good reason – but have confidence in the efficacy. The fact that Duggan was carrying a gun when shot would have ended the debate about injustice in America, Caldwell claims. We are heading down that road, too.

I am not sure he's right about all of this, and pretty sure that ethnic minorities in the US – notably black and Hispanic – would agree with the posh white guy either. But it is a coherent point of view and a sharp reminder of the choices we face.

There far more people in prison in the US than in China, with four times the population, and gun violence is rampant – more than 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2007 alone. It's a wonderful country in all sorts of ways if you're not poor, very hard if you are.

But America's law and order settlement is not one any sensible foreigner would want to embrace. Sorry, Bill Bratton, I know you've done some good work and we're all keen to learn from each other. But you were starting from a very different and much, much more violent place. We don't need it here.